10/12/2026
Karting started in a California car park in the late fifties, and nobody was building engines for it.
What you did instead was go to a hardware shop. McCulloch made chainsaw engines. Clinton made engines for lawnmowers and generators. JLO and Stihl were doing the same thing in Europe. All of them were cheap, available, and built to run at a steady speed while cutting wood or grass.
They were never designed to be raced. They were just the only small two-strokes you could buy.
Giovanni Parilla looked at that and saw the obvious problem. If every kart runs a modified garden tool, then the first person to build a proper racing engine wins everything.
In 1961 he produced the V11.
It was a 100cc two-stroke laid on its side with direct drive, and the two things that mattered about it were the induction and the cooling. Instead of letting the piston open and close the intake port, it used a rotary disc valve driven off the crankshaft, which lets you open the intake earlier and close it later than a piston ever can. More time to fill the crankcase means more mixture, and at the speeds these engines run that is most of the battle.
And because a kart engine sits low behind the driver in still air with nothing blowing over it, he fitted a fan to drive air across the fins rather than relying on the kart moving.
Sold outside Italy, the engine carried the name Saetta.
It was the first engine ever mass produced purely for karting, and within two years everything had followed it. The vertical versions arrived, Saetta V12, Komet K12, Parilla S13, and the hardware shop engines were finished.
Italy has dominated kart engines ever since, and it starts here.
